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CU Boulder Lands A Slot On First Orion Flight Around The Moon

When NASA launches Orion EM-1 in 2020, its first mission to orbit the
moon since 1972, experiments from the University of Colorado Boulder
will be aboard.

The space agency has announced a CU Boulder BioServe Space Technologies project led by Smead Aerospace Assistant Research Professor Luis Zea has earned one of four slots for Space Biology Program research aboard Orion. Zea’s team’s work will help researchers better understand how living organisms are affected by deep space in preparation for human missions to the moon and eventually Mars.

Radiation In Space

The goal is to study DNA damage and protection from dangerous,
space-based radiation that comes from the sun and galactic cosmic rays
and is a major concern for long-duration missions.

Humans on Earth and in low orbit, such as those aboard the
International Space Station, are protected from destructive radiation
due to the Van Allen belts, an area of magnetic charged particles that
encircle our planet. However, travel past them and you can be hit with
alarming amounts of radiation.

“When radiation hits DNA, it can cause damage. Our bodies have repair
mechanisms, but they sometimes fail. If the damage occurs on an
important area of the genome, it can have harmful consequences – this is
one of the bases of cancer,” Zea said.

Brewing Science

For the study, Orion will carry a series of cell cultures containing
an unusual substance — Brewer’s yeast. It may sound like a strange
choice, but yeast genes are more similar to human DNA than you might
expect.

“About 70 percent of the essential genes in yeast have counterparts
in the human genome,” Corey Nislow at the University of British
Columbia, the other principal investigator, said. “We’ll measure their
ability to survive under radiation conditions and quantify which
cultures do better than others.”

Millions Of Cells

NASA has past experience with higher space radiation levels through
the Apollo astronauts, but their time in space was brief compared to
lengthy missions proposed for the future. The longest moon mission,
Apollo 17, spent 12 days in space. A manned flight to Mars is estimated
to take four to six months just to get to the red planet; it does not
include any time spent on the surface or coming back to Earth.

“It would also be hard to do statistics with data from just a couple
of astronauts, but we can fly millions and millions of yeast cells in a
volume similar to that of a writing pen,” Zea said.

Orion is currently slated for a June 2020 launch from Cape Canaveral.

Zea is one of two principal investigators on the project, along with
Corey Nislow at the University of British Columbia. Additional
collaboration has come from Zea’s colleagues at CU Boulder’s BioServe
Space Technologies, Christopher Carr from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, and Ralf Moeller of the German Aerospace Center.